Local SHPE Chapter hosts Noche de Ciencia at Area High School
October 17, 2012

The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) professional chapter at LM Aero Fort Worth hosted a Noche de Ciencias "Science Night" on Tuesday, October 2 at Euless Trinity High School. The event this year was sponsored by the U.S. Navy Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), and is the first of two events planned for this month by the SHPE LM Aero-Fort Worth chapter. The next one is planned for October 22 at Fort Worth's Trimble Tech HS at 6:00pm. The Noche de Ciencia program is a SHPE National initiative designed to engage the Hispanic community in a relaxed environment to have fun with science and engineering and promote college awareness in a bilingual setting. The science night was a three-hour evening dual program including two science activities for the students and two bilingual parent college awareness workshops. The theme for the evening was on the NASA Mars Curiosity rover program. In the first activity, the students learned about rocketry and then put their knowledge into practice by building their own soda straw rockets to launch from Earth to Mars. After landing on Mars, then each team competed for the best creative story about the artifacts collected during the Mystery Planet activity. The top three teams in each activity won F-35 coins, patches and lapel pins as prizes. All students received certificates for participating. The first parent workshop was about how to finance college covering the different options including scholarships, grants, loans, and employment. The second workshop focused on teaching parents what to expect when sending their kids off to college for the first time. Both workshops were provided in English and Spanish. The event was open to 10-12th grade students at Trinity HS and the 9th grade students at the three feeder junior high schools including Harwood, Bedford, and Central Junior High Schools. There were a total of 30 students and 20 parents in attendance. Overall, the event was a great success and continued the strong partnership between the SHPE at LM Aero chapter and Trinity HS. Trinity HS recently established a SHPE junior chapter that was incorporated in February 2012. SHPE LM Aero also mentors two Trinity HS FIRST Robotics Tech Challenge (FTC) teams for the 2012-2013 FIRST robotics competition season.